kluge

On your second to last point, it's pretty good information strategy...especially if deniable. People will...as we are doing...speculate endlessly on who/what/why in the absence of confirmation. Taken as a given that dictatorships under stress simply cannot afford to look weak, few will believe Putin did it to himself. So, the discussion will be of internal or external enemies, what it says about Moscow's vulnerabilities, Russia's military weakness, oligarch or military maneuvering, etc. In other words, a perfect way to accelerate Russian society's predilection for conspiracy and fear mongering.
So...no benefits for Putin but some very solid benefits for Ukraine and Zelensky...if he coolly denies it. 
PS: if we wanted confirmation that it *wasn't* a false flag, the fact that the Kremlin tried to keep it under wraps and had no orchestrated announcements or measures is pretty definitive. The Russian's don't take a dump, et cetera and so forth.

First example of Russian thinking outide the box during this war.

Don't believe the hype.
And there is no universe in which China, India, etc take what is essentially an embarrassing nuisance attack as a legitimate excuse to drop a nuke.
 

Mark Herman (who designed Gulf Strike) is designing a commercial board wargame on the first months of the 2022 invasion. Article here  >  First draft of history  and it shows the draft game map and some of the game materials. The article doesn't say who the piblisher will be, but the game is due out early next year.
The thread on Board Game Geek has a useful link to some of the other professional games being played or designed. The thread is here > Boardgame geek: modeling ongoing conflict
 

Except that if it IS emitting a signal it will also be dead in no time. You've just invented red-force-tracking, except the beneficiary is the enemy, not us.

Actually technology is getting to a point where a 2 man tank will be perfectly effective. The problem with 2-man tanks in WW2 was that the commander was overworked. He had to command the tank, spot targets, aim and fire the gun, and load the gun. One man was trying to be commander, loader, and gunner. Technology has eliminated most of that workload. Obviously the job of the loader could be automated since the 60s. But automatic target tracking is just about to a point where the job of the gunner can be automated as well. As I've said before, a human still needs to be in the loop because AI is still too stupid to be trusted with target identification and selection. But it can make all the targeting calculations and fire on a target that has been designated by a human.
Part of the job of the commander is already to look for new targets while the gunner is busy engaging the last target. And with modern hunter-killer systems the commander is already expected to slew the turret towards the next target for the gunner to engage, while he then goes back to scanning for new targets. With a modern 2-man tank concept a commander would just be modifying his old job description, so that instead of slewing the turret when he spotted a target, he would mark it for the FCS, which would then automatically engage and destroy it (human makes the targeting decisions, computer makes and executes the targeting calculations). With both the loader and gunner roles being automated, the commander of a modern 2-man tank would be no more overworked than the commander of a WW2 5-man tank.
The only downsides to this approach is that you have one less pair of eyes looking for targets, and you have one less pair of hands to assist in maintenance. The maintenance workload could probably be solved with some organizational changes, since there is no reason you couldn't have additional maintenance personnel in a unit that aren't necessarily tank crew (although perhaps they could be reserve tank crew, in case of casualties, sickness, leave, etc...).

The gunner can only not be in the tank if you are 6-sigma certain that nothing is going to interfere with their telepresence. Which is difficult when the enemy knows that all they need to do to render a critical weapon system (whether that's a swarm of UGVs or a single Citadel Tank) inoperative is to disrupt the comms. The more remote operation stuff there is, the more treasure will be spent on busting the comms links and the more treasure will have to be spent on hardening those links.
Also, if the gunner isn't in the tank, the rest of the crew aren't either, and field maintenance and repairs that the crew do "traditionally" become a new problem that will need solving.

Fair enough. Flying to and hitting the target is well within what modern technology can do. So kamikaze drones probably don't need a "pilot" anymore. I was thinking more in terms of target selection and identification. And in that respect we are still a long way from being able to take the human out of the loop. I think we are going to see three stages of autonomous weapons.
1. The weapon is smart enough to find its own way to the target, but the target still has to be identified and selected by a human. This is where we are today.
2. The weapon is smart enough to identify and select its own targets, but with a high enough error rate that a human needs to be in the loop to explicitly approve the target before the weapon can be allowed to kill it. I think we'll get here over the next decade.
3. The weapon is smart enough to be trusted as a fully autonomous system. We have a ways to go to get here.

The last piece of the puzzle that is defiantly not ready yet is identifying enemy vs friendlies.
Steve is right if you setup an autonomous drone in an area you know there are no friendlies all is good. If there is a chance the guys running for cover into the bunker (to refer back to the footage that started this) then you do not want an AI drone choosing to target or not.

I emphasize again, while I do think warfare is headed in that direction, it is still a long way away. As impressive as chat GPT looks from the outside, AI just isn't there yet.
Fully autonomous weapon systems are next decade's tech (at the earliest), not this decade's.

I'm going to wear my optimist hat again today.
I think we have identified C4ISR as one of the most important things in this war. We've seen that the UA has what could really be viewed as C4ISR supremacy. Corrosive warfare will most likely be what is used in the initial phase to create an exploitable weakness or even to clear the breach. We've discussed a lot about the fact that the lines are held by too few troops. If the RA does have available reserves the UA most likely knows what they are and where they are at. With the low headcount defending the very long front it isn't like there are many areas that have a defense in depth. So once the crust is broken there shouldn't be much to stand in the way. If the RA is operating with a severe deficit of C4ISR like we think then the advantage should be to the UA. If the RA doesn't know where the UA is it makes it a lot harder for them to contain or even move against a breakthrough.
A good case to show this is the Great Raid of 2014. A UA force was able to travel 470km behind the lines, complete their mission and get back out over a course of 22 days. So in 22 days the RA was unable to find, fix, and destroy a raiding force of a couple battalions. Not some 4 man Force Recon team, a couple battalions. This sort of situation gives me lots of hope, especially in the south.
If the UA does have 9 or so newly staffed, equipped, and trained brigades on a leash and can get them through a breach, will the RA be able to deal with that? The corrosive type slow warfare all along the lines gives the RA a situation they can somewhat handle as it is really slow. How will they handle fast? I'm betting it will look a lot more like Kharkiv than Kherson.
So there you have my sunshine and rainbows for the day.  

At the ranges involved in encircling something like Bakhmut, or Kherson, given UKR levels of C4ISR, GMLRS equivalents in sufficient numbers ought to be able to substitute for TacAir on eiher offense or defense, when deciding whether kettles might form.
Russia doesn't have the precision info they need, and UKR don't have enough rocket artillery. But even if they did (or had TacAir able to freely sprinkle their goodies over the battlefield, this:
wouldn't go away in a hurry.

What is weird about this one is that the UA did not need to construct the "most extensive systems of military defensive works seen anywhere in the world in many decades" and they held off multiple assaults that went on for months all along the line.  

The airpower conundrum.  So here is the thing with AirPower - it is only about a century old as concept and we do not know if it has been a transitory phase in the evolution of warfare.  Everyone assumes that it must be a thing because we can "do air" now, and this part is correct.  However, "how we do air" is really in its infancy when compared to maritime and land military domains (and they have been bouncing around too), and is by no means decided.
So the question as to Ukraine is a bit chicken and egg.  Is this what they have to live with, or is this just how things are now?  The issue is military economics.  Airpower is really expensive right now and built around projecting airpower mass.  Big planes with big payloads in big waves.  One side has it and takes it away from an opponent - Bob'd your uncle and the war is over in a bibby, accept for all that nasty uncon stuff which really does not count - unless we are talking places like Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon Vietnam, Afghanistan (both times) and maybe Iraq - but we are not talking about them.  In a real war airpower is definitive and deterministic to an outcome.
Ok, sure...right up the point it no longer works.  Now why is it not working?  We the problem looks to be similar to the problems of other military mass - a concentration dilemma.  Technology has created small little nasty systems that can be carried around that have suddenly gained ridiculous range and lethality.  They are also really hard to suppress and toxic to massed concentrations.  "Oh but we have all the SEAD".  Well true but even our SEAD cannot solve for things like MANPADs and IADS, especially when they are hooked into a C4ISR architecture that can see everything.  The cost gets too high very quickly.
"Well we won't go there"...whoops, that is never the right answer.  If we can't go "there" someone else will. So when we go there we will have to accept less than total air dominance, in fact we might have to live with air denial above certain altitudes.
And then there is the below 2000 feet problem.  It is the freakin Wild West for air power right now and no one is controlling it in any meaningful way.  We get some denial but those UAS are so cheap that they can just keep lobbing them at the problem indefinitely.  So we are looking at denial risks above 2000 feet and not being able to control below 2000 feet...none of this is good news that magic western might is going to wave away.  Someone is very shortly going to figure out how to mount a Starstreak on a modest UAS and then we have a whole new set of problems.  And then there is ersatz airpower in the form of long range strike.  No one has the technology for whatever version of Chinese HIMARs looks like ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHL-03 that took seconds).
Bottom line is that I, personally, do not think that the air denial and control problems we are seeing in Ukraine are specific to this conflict.  The technology is moving too fast.  We are likely going to have to accept that the airpower picture is going to be compromised and that we are vulnerable to whatever it is becoming and its cousins in long range strike.  We do not have a magic suite of capability that can erase what we are basically arming the Ukrainian's to do against the Russians.  I do no think the western assumption of air superiority, or space superiority, or EW/Cyber superiority or good old fashion land power mass and manoeuvre superiority are currently safe regardless of what conflicts we see them in. 

I think the problem with this sort of point of view is that it still assumes that annihilation through manoeuvre was possible. And even if it was, would it have been worth the costs at that point in the war? 
Russia got itself out of Kherson; however, 1) we do not know the full scope of attritional losses over time - how much critical equipment did they leave behind? and 2) how do those stack up with Ukrainian gains compared to their loses?  This point of view mirrors more than a few western pundits as “lost opportunity = loss”, but skips over the cost-benefit equation on retaking a regional capital essentially unopposed.  I strongly suspect that the UA looking to a longer game was not interested in bagging whatever was left of the RA at Kherson because the cost was too high for the gains.  Worst scenario for Kherson was a large urban battle that would still be raging.  If Ukraine had boxed the RA up into that city that is what likely would have happened.  Instead Ukraine left the back door open so the RA would simply leave - it was less about killing Russians there and more about liberating Ukrainians.
We keep making the error of looking for a western style victory in this thing.  I have seen more bold offensive arrows, both red and blue, being drawn all over the place.  What we have seen though is bold arrows of red collapse, with a blue follow up.  This is a war of Russian collapses and contractions, some better controlled than others.  This is what victory looks like, yet we keep demanding a Gulf War metric as an indicator of success, which does not track in this environment.  The losses are over time, erosion, not fast forced crushing.  It is the environment that drives this - death of surprise, mass dilemmas, long range and precision.   We are talking about a war where both sides have had to relegate their armor to indirect fire roles - something is happening in a fundamental way.
So what?  Well this does not mean that the 30k prisoner haul is impossible in this war, or the bold strokes we all want to see.  However, I strongly suspect that they are going to be a finishing stroke/final note at the end as a result of corrosive warfare, not the cause of the end itself.  The core warfare principle we in the west adhere to will become a punctuation mark, not the primary means of delivery of victory.  We should not hold Ukraine to a standard of success that I am not sure even exists anymore in this sort of operating environment.  This war is still about killing Russians, but it is all over the place, all the time, not in a single concentrated area.  Why, because concentration kills in this environment unless you have already eroded an opponent into collapse - be it slow or fast.
In the end Kherson along with Kharkiv were major corrosive warfare victories.  At Kherson the UA with nearly 1:1 force ratio pushed the RA across a major river because they made their position untenable.  They retook a provincial capital of 300k taking very few losses which was a major strategic blow to Russia - no one could call this war for Russia after Kharkiv and Kherson (or at least no one credible).  We should not apply our own western experience to this war because we have not fought one like this since Korea, and the rules of the game have shifted dramatically since then.
I for one am surprised that Kherson did not turn into a protracted bloodbath, there was a lost RA opportunity that speaks to an idea that perhaps Russian Will is not made of steel.  Now if Russia is finally so badly beat up that the old rules of warfare apply - a la Iraqi Army - then yippee!  But that 1) does not validate our western doctrines as “right all along” because that final stroke took a year of broad scope high speed attrition pruning ops and 2) will be a signpost, not a decisive point.  The result of months of shaping and eroding that has already occurred over the winter. 

Russia already did this from 2014-2022 and the sky did not fall.  They are very likely to be complete a@@holes no matter how this thing goes.  What I disagree with is the idea that Russia is somehow going to be willing to sustain complete Western isolation and grinding losses for the next century.  There is a lot of "Forever Russian Bear" myths floating around and this just feeds into them and gives Russia far too much credit and stamina.  It also runs paradoxical to other narratives of "backward Russians who wont do anything so long as they are fed vodka and propaganda", because decades of a slow burning war is a lot of "something".
"It's up to the loser to decide when a war ends"...nonsense.  Gulf War One, Korea, WW1, all of these were ended when both sides decided to quit, not the "loser".  Gulf War, US coalition decided to stop at Iraqi border.  Korea, both sides decided to sign the cease-fire.  WWI, Allies did not invade into Germany for a full occupation driven victory.  The loser decides when to stop resisting and the winner has to decide when to stop winning.   The history of warfare is full of examples where the winner went "good enough" and tied the thing off.  And plenty where the loser refused to quit and slowly petered out until they wasted away and were unable to continue - like the entirety of indigenous resistance in NA.
What Russia doesn't have to do is normalize with the West, this is not the same as negotiation.  We will very likely arm the ever living daylights out of Ukraine after this war and invest very heavily in its reconstruction.  One thing that has stuck in my throat since this whole thing began is a myth that the West is somehow weak and barely holding on against the might of an unassailable Russia.  "Russia will win this in a matter of weeks" (they did not), "Russian mass will eventually wear Ukraine out" (it did not), "Russia has escalation dominance" (they did not, we did), "Russia will decide when this war is over." no they won't all sides will have to decide that.  We could be fighting a containment and compression war against Russia for years and based on how the last one of those went I would be very concerned to be Russian right now. 

You really can if one is trying to negotiate towards a workable victory.  I think what a lot of pundits are missing is that the West (US in particular) need Russia to lose - just enough.  This drives an incremental approach of slow eroding pressure as opposed to a coherent campaign plan that sees Russia tossed back over the border completely by X date.
As of today and the pending Ukrainian offensive the risk from a western perspective is not Ukraine doing enough, it is doing too much or going too far.  I disagree with the idea that Russia can sustain a 5 year war.  It ignores the main principle of corrosive warfare which is eroding an opponents operational system faster and better than they can repair it.  Russian forces would need a serious inject of external support to shore up its failing system.  So unless China steps in and gets really serious about reestablishing a level of symmetry, Russian is on the wrong end of a devolution curve.  
In the 21st century one cannot simply stuff ill-trained and I’ll-supported troops in holes and hold ground.  Not if your LOCs remain in clear view and actionable ranges.  Your armor is blunted, your AirPower denied and your guns are wearing out.  We are about to see how well a conventional defence hold up under these conditions and my bet is “not well”.
The risk of Ukraine over-reach is not small.  It could create shock and panic at political levels in Russia, and those conditions are when major mistakes start being made. This entire thing has hallmarks of threading a pretty tricky strategic needle.  It may feel good to see ATACMS hammering everything in depth but it could lead to an uncontrollable Russian collapse, which we have discussed at length, and clearly regardless of our opinions this is a serious concern to those in political leadership in the West.
To summarize - slow motion collapse with off-ramps = good.  Uncontrolled collapse in a suicidal game of chicken = bad.  The strategy we are seeing is aligned with the first one.
The_Capt’s second axiom - “strategy must not only encompass a theory of one’s own victory, it must also encompass a theory of an opponents defeat.”

Heh
I once dug a pit down through a rabbit warren, lots of kyoot kittens to deal with after that.
But the worst was digging in at the training area near Singleton, in NSW. The whole area is an iron pan, so it's tink-tink-tink for hours, moving about a teaspoon of dirt at a time. Then, come dawn, we found we'd dug down through a nest of now very angry inchies. Giving up on that spot we moved a few metres away and tink-tink-tinked our way down again, this time through a nest of fire ants.
**** Australia.

What happens when you hit a tilt rod mine under the water.  When we were doing underwater clearance drills for landings or crossings, tilt rod mines were of particular concern because they could be rigged easily for triggering against silent clearance operations.  Impossible to see at night, even with NVGs and could be daisy chained, sometimes with nasty stuff like wire.
Looks like what happens is that one gets blown very high into the air and spread over a large area (nod to Blackadder).  Always knew they were bad news but never actually saw one used in combat.

As far as I can see the vast majority of these hits on civilian targets are just misses from nearby (real or imagined) military related infrastructure (they have a fairly loose definition of that though). The Russians are not deliberately terror bombing they just don't care if they hit civilians while they go after what they perceive as higher value targets. 
These misses are caused by old/bad information, inaccurate missiles, poor mission planning, AD shootdowns etc. The Russians (rightly or wrongly) think they are targeting ammo dumps, machine repair shops, factories, training centres, transport infrastructure, hospitals, substations etc. 
If the Russians really wanted to do a terror bombing campaign they would just fling a bunch of dumb bombs or rockets randomly at Kharkiv or Kherson and we would be getting daily updates of the destruction. 
Don't take this as me defending them, but they are not carpet bombing like it's 1945, and they don't want to waste million dollar missiles on a handful of civilians in a tower block. 

Since I am not above shamelessly stealing a joke from Reddit:
 
Are we sure that is an oil depot on fire and not Admiral Kuznetsov pulling into Sevastopol harbour?

Sniff sniff
I smell shaping ops... 
 

Look fair points and I do not want to punish counter-thinking, that is not what we are about here.  However, it really needs to be based on some fundamental indicators.  We would need to see a shift in RA capability on a systems level.  A few TU22s with napalm does not an effective CAS program make.  In fact given that platform we are more likely going to see incendiary terror attacks because Russia is all “FU LOAC!” -  note: see no-normalization, which is no doubt Putin’s plan as he does not want Russia to have a viable out as it would undermine him.
I do want to unpack just one thing further - the Putin Line.  Ok, so obstacles are basically inert in reality.  They cannot move or cause effects at range.  They exist solely to create enormous friction on an opponent in a very narrow window.  When properly supported this can be decisive as a smaller force can really cut a larger force to pieces.  Problem - you need well coordinated and agile smaller forces.  When it comes to quality capability Russia has the smaller force.  Guns that can rapidly respond and shoot and move.  C-move forces that can quickly reposition.  
The RA has basically been throwing up all over itself for over a year. The quality forces it needs to actually exploit those narrow windows of opportunity are in the minority.  Instead they have wads of infantry stuffed into holes and even those are mauled up.  When I saw Russia attacking this winter, I was shocked (and probably should not have been).  It is pure madness to bleed out a force on useless objectives when one is trying to freeze a conflict in place and play a long game.  So now the RA is badly beat up.  It has lost a lot of operational connective tissue and enablers it simply cannot make up for.  One could argue that Bakhmut was not a Russian Offensive as much as it was a Ukrainian shaping operation.
So what?  Well they can have mounds of dragons teeth and AT ditches but their ability to actually cover them with effective fires is highly in question.  These are really big frontages they have to cover off.  Further the west is pushing all the ISR to the UA so they can see the weak points.  The UA can also conduct deep strike campaigns to make things worse both before and during the offensive.  Then, as has been noted, once the shell is first rotted out, and then broken, there is nothing substantial behind it.
Finally, I am not even sure obstacles work like they used to anymore.  If I can see your entire operational system and hit it, I could stand back and hammer it until it collapses under its own weight and simply walk over the obstacles.  The actual ROI on obstacles as they stand now is in question.
This is a lot like back in the Gulf War.  People saw the massive, and amazingly professional Iraqi obstacle belts and got really concerned.  In the end it did not matter, massed AirPower followed up by GPS enabled manoeuvre made all that work useless.  I do not think the UA has the same level of advantage here but they likely have enough to crack this egg and make some break outs, likely in a couple locales.
Gonna be one for the books…and stay tuned in right here kids, we will be providing colour commentary the whole way!

Part 3 of battle for “Cyclops” position. Shows how difficult and dangerous this work is even with drone support:
 

The trouble with defining success is that in the real world success is a spectrum, not a toggle. The question isn't "will it be a success?", but "how successful will it be?". Ukraine is certain to retake some territory and inflict some casualties, just as it is certain to take some casualties. But it all comes down to how much of each. If they just manage to retake a handful of towns and inflict a few thousand casualties, but lose tens of thousand of soldiers in the process, then it will be a dismal failure (like the Russian winter offensive). If they manage to drive the Russians out of Ukraine entirely, effectively destroy the entire Russian army, and only lose a handful of men, then it will be a crushing victory. And there are a million variations in between those two extremes, each more successful than some possible outcomes, and less successful than other possible outcomes.
For my part I'm hoping to at least see a chunk of territory retaken on par with the Kherson or Kharkiv offensives, with enough strength left in the Ukrainian army to follow it up with at least one more offensive before the year is out. If it can accomplish something of strategic value, like cutting the Crimean land bridge, then that's even better. An even better outcome would be to not only take everything up to the neck of Crimea, but to retake Crimea as well all in one go. And in my wildest dreams I even imagine this thing collapsing the whole Russian frontline.
Of course the media is going to report the outcome as a position on a toggle, not a position on a spectrum (success or failure, not a degree of success). Whether it will be reported as a success will be determined by whether the results exceeded or fell short of public expectations. So it would seem that the best way to get PR victories in a war is to keep public expectations as low as possible. Kharkiv was playing this game on easy mode, since it came completely out of the blue, with no public expectations at all. Does anyone have any feel for what the public expectations are for this offensive? Are people expecting it to drive the Russians completely out of Ukraine or to just move the needle a bit?